Branding is the process of publicly associating an idea, quality, sentiment or similar things with an identity. The identity commonly belongs to a company or a product. Effective branding for a company, or the company's products and/or services, has become increasingly important to achieve success. While branding may be accomplished through many venues, such as advertising on a website, printed materials, audiovisuals or company involvement in social projects, another venue with growing prevalence is through software applications by which users or consumers interact with the company. These interactions may involve how the products and/or services are provided by the company, or how information about the products and/or services is provided.
In many instances, software applications themselves are goods sold by a company. These instances, for example, may include companies that develop and sell business applications, such as word processing applications, spreadsheets, etc., video games, operating systems, and other types of applications. In these instances, a company typically includes branding in the software products, and branding may be considered and incorporated throughout the development of the software product.
In other instances, a company and its customers may use a software application which is developed for the company, but the company does not sell the software application as a product. In these instances, typically little or no consideration is given to brand (of a product or company) associated with the application because the software application is not the company's product offered for sale and secondly the focus of the development is on the technical/functional aspects of the application. However, even in these instances, branding may still impact a customer's perception of the company or product, which can affect sales of the company's products or services.
For example, a company selling vehicles may develop a software application which allows its customers to obtain financing online. The software application runs on a server processing financing applications, and customers access the software application through a web portal to the server. The primary development considerations to the developers for these types of software applications tend to be the utility aspects, such as user convenience, user ease-of-use, integration of application with the back end systems, technology architecture, etc. Brand impact may not be considered at all by the developers, or it may only be considered to the extent that a company logo is included on graphical user interface (GUI) screens of the software application.
As a result, brand characteristics of a brand associated with the company, its products and/or its services, may not coincide or may even conflict with the utility software application properties associated with the software application. This disconnect or conflict may cause negative sentiment among users of the software application, or it may present the brand in a manner which is inconsistent with the established branding characteristics of the company, its products and/or services. It may even dilute the brand causing a loss of goodwill toward the brand, and thus the company, resulting in an economic loss to the company.
In addition, a design team associated with developing a large or complex software application may include scores or even hundreds of software developers. These may be involved in developing different sub-programs and various aspects of the software application, which may be completely unrelated at the sub-program development level. Furthermore, the broad nature of the different environments in which the software application might be implemented, can present multiple impediments to accomplishing effective branding of a company or product associated with the software application. Due to these difficulties, providing and maintaining effective branding of a company or a product or service associated with software applications which are not company products is a growing challenge.